Startups

Lessons scaling from 10 to 20 people. Ten person startups (or smaller) often have a lot of generalists.

Everyone does a little of everything, which is what can make startups exciting. We had “support / office admin,” “product / support” positions and other combinations. The reason startups do that is because they don’t have enough admin or product work to warrant a full-time role. When you grow past 10 people to 15 or 20, that structure starts to break down.
Themacro. Startups in 13 Sentences. February 2009.

Bridges the gap between academic computer science and production software engineering. Fast-paced introduction to key tools and techniques (command line, dotfiles, text editor, distributed version control, debugging, testing, documentation, reading code, deployments), featuring guest appearances by senior engineers from successful startups and large-scale academic projects. Over the course of the class, students will build a command line application, expose it as a web service, and then link other students' applications and services together to build an HTML5 mobile app. General principles are illustrated through modern Javascript and the latest web technologies, including Node, Backbone, Coffeescript, Bootstrap, Git, and Github. Course Format. Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Our Salaries. UPDATE November 25, 2015: We have a brand-new salary formula and an updated, searchable list of all our salaries.

Find it all here! When we first established the Buffer values that we wanted to have as the center of our company culture, we knew that sticking to these ideas would be an incredible challenge. Especially since we’ve seen before that these values can easily end up being little more than a set of words written on a piece of paper. In our culture deck, the second value on our list at Buffer is “Default to Transparency.” With this point especially, we started to think about everything we do within the company and how we could change it to something more transparent. Sticking to radical transparency was probably both one of the most frightening and exciting things to do over the past months. From the examples above, I often reflect on the power of transparency.

How to Start a Startup. Things you should know about stock options before negotiating an offer. Are you considering an offer from a private company, which involves stock options?

Especially as a developer. It takes time to get in the zone, and once you're there it's easy to get pulled out. You have... Meetings Email Features to build, bugs to fix. How to convince a startup to hire you by. This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!)

Questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live.
Sorry, Travis, but I'm boycotting Uber. It pains me to have to delete the Uber app; in fact, I've been procrastinating on pulling the trigger all day.

I've grown loyal to the service over the last couple of years, and you can see just how pro-Uber I was in this anti-taxi opinion piece from earlier this year.
Startups in 13 Sentences. February 2009.

The Myths You’ll Hear About Working as an Engineer at a Startup — Karl L. Hughes. When I first graduated from college and went looking for a job with a startup I had no idea what to expect.

I knew what I didn’t want – I had done internships with some huge corporations already – but finding honest accounts from engineers who had worked at startups was difficult. Most of the articles I found were glorious sugarcoated accounts of the rare success stories. Many of the early employees at Google and Apple and Facebook had written books and blog posts galore, but what about the thousands of less lucky startup employees out there?
Startup Growth Calculator. How to Model Viral Growth: The Hybrid Model. Retention is King (Guest Post)
This is a guest post by a friend of mine on retention. Jamie Quint is Managing Partner of Quint Growth, a full-service growth consultancy that works with companies like Twitch and Hipmunk.

Experiments at Airbnb. Airbnb is an online two-sided marketplace that matches people who rent out their homes (‘hosts’) with people who are looking for a place to stay (‘guests’). We use controlled experiments to learn and make decisions at every step of product development, from design to algorithms. They are equally important in shaping the user experience. While the basic principles behind controlled experiments are relatively straightforward, using experiments in a complex online ecosystem like Airbnb during fast-paced product development can lead to a number of common pitfalls. Some, like stopping an experiment too soon, are relevant to most experiments. Others, like the issue of introducing bias on a marketplace level, start becoming relevant for a more specialized application like Airbnb.
(1) What are the most common mistakes first-time entrepreneurs make?
Lessons learned?
Rate-of-learning: the most valuable startup compensation.

The frothiness of today’s environment in Silicon Valley makes it easy to get sucked into a warped sense of reality. Valuations are high, capital is cheap, housing prices are skyrocketing, and RSUs are flowing like wine. Talk of another “bubble” is rebuffed, even by those who were scarred by the Dot-com collapse of 2000. Some argue we’ve exited the installation phase of technology—which was still sputtering along at the dawn of the new millennium—and have entered what Carlota Perez calls the ‘deployment phase’ of technology. In this phase, startups move “up the stack”, switching from building core infrastructure (i.e. interstate highways) to applications that go on top of it (i.e.

Teslas). Undoubtedly, changes in technology over the last 15 years have been breathtaking. One risk of living in this Gilded Age of Tech is the temptation to view your own career and compensation through a disproportionately financial lens—much as a growing company would.
Design, science, education & Innovation. 57 startup lessons. I am a cofounder of RethinkDB — an open-source distributed database designed to help developers and operations teams work with unstructured data to build real-time applications. There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here).

I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years.
What Makes Founders Succeed - Founders at Work posthaven. Some kind of magic happens in startups, especially at the very beginning, but the only people there to see it are the founders. The best way to understand what happens is to ask them, so that’s what I did. In the book, you’ll hear the founders’ stories in their own words.